Beautiful Inside and Out, Part 1

"Look at me. I used to be pretty," my great-grandmother said to me when I was visiting her in the assisted living center.

I had dropped in one sunny spring afternoon during my spring break from college. While she welcomed me with a smile and a kiss initially, her secondary response was to slap me across the shoulder, because she wasn't ready to receive visitors. She immediately put on some lipstick and then turned to her thinning hair. That 's when she started talking.

“Some might even say beautiful," she continued. "I would say I was someone who knew how to look beautiful when the situation or need arose. Stunning. Drawing attention to myself. I liked to have men look at me." She smiled at her former self in the mirror.

Then she put the brush down and then took a good look at herself in the mirror.

“Then one morning I woke up, and I was ugly.”

“Grandma!” I scolded.

“No, it’s true,” she interrupted. “I was ugly and old. My hair was white and getting dry. I had bags around my eyes, and this long eyebrow whisker. That I could fix, but the other, it was just me. There was nothing I could do about it.”

She went to her closet and selected a sweater. Holding it up, she turned to me.

"Will this be enough?" she asked.

I nodded. "It's nice out."

She pursed her lips. "Nice for you or nice for me?" she inquired. "Remember, honey, you're a very warm-blooded man, and I am a reptile."

"Warm blooded with very cold hands, you mean," I corrected. "Warm enough for you, in a sweater."

I offered her my arm and escorted her out of her room, down the hall and into the facility's garden.

“They used to say, ‘ugly is as ugly does,’” she continued, as I helped her into her sweater, “and I was ugly on the inside. Florence, my sister-in-law, warned me. You remember her, Aaron's wife? 'Leta,’ she said, ‘you are a beautiful woman, and I can’t help but think that all this running around is going to come back to you one of these days.’ She didn't say anything else, but I knew what she meant. How I was living was dark and ugly. I wasn’t married at the time, and she didn’t think a single woman should be consorting with the kind of men I was with, you see. They were rough types, you know, and some were even married, and I knew it. But it didn’t stop me. In those days, women who went with men weren’t respected very much.”

“Grandma, even today, women who date a lot of men aren’t respected,” I shared.

“But it’s different for men,” she noted, “except, come to think of it, Florence used to tell her husband Aaron that he was ugly on the inside, too, and one day, if he didn't change his ways, it would surface.”

“Did it?” I asked.

“Not that he was ever very handsome, even if he was my brother, but no, it never showed up in him,” she answered. “But he stopped.”

“Stopped?”

“One afternoon he just came home from work, kissed Florence on the cheek, planted himself in his easy chair to read the paper and never went back to the Flat Iron Bar where he used to spend a lot of time or anywhere else again,” she said.”